Songs of Innocence and Experience

In Preface...

For the past two years, I have been a surrogate father, playmate and partner in crime of a little girl. Her name is Rhiannon, and she is now three years old. I am 53 years old at this writing, and have never lived with a young girl before. Rhiannon and her mother came to live with my wife and I two years ago, and they are family.

In helping to raise Rhiannon, certain things have become very important to me. First and foremost, I want her to be and become her own person – strong, independent, self-reliant, thinking and acting according to her own lights. While every child needs to be protected, they have an equal need to explore and develop as an autonomous person, and this need should never be repressed, no matter how much a protective adult might worry and no matter how often the child becomes a royal pain in the neck. Of equal importance, I want to see her grow up healthy, trusting, joyful and open to life, love and experience. For an adult, this requires a focus on nurturing a child, of trying very hard to merit the child’s trust and affection, and of imparting a sense of the wonder and beauty of life. I also want Rhiannon to grow up trusting herself and trusting life. This implies that an adult should help a child to see life as something that can be understood and explained, as something that makes sense.

Then there are more intangible things, such as teaching a child the value and meaning of her own intelligence, developing a sense of insatiable curiosity, encouraging a child to explore the whole universe and to view life as an act of creation. With Rhiannon, I try to encourage her natural gift of storytelling, and her flair for both drama and raucous humor. I encourage her to draw, paint, dance, play music (after the fashion of a three-year-old) and weave fantastic fables. I try to pass on to her my love of the land, of nature, of natural beauty, and my reverence for the Earth.

In helping to raise Rhiannon, I will admit to being surprised by the natural development of eroticism in such a very young child. Of course, I had known this in theory from reading books about early childhood development. To see it first-hand, however, has been revelatory. Some aspects of this series of revelations have been very beautiful to behold, and some have been uncomfortable to deal with. Yet, my overriding impression in watching Rhiannon develop is that the experience has been a profound affirmation of the inherent beauty of sexuality and of the sacredness of the erotic that is our birthright as humans. Of major importance to me, watching the unfolding of Rhiannon’s natural sense of eroticism has validated something I have felt all of my life: that eroticism and sexuality are not separated from the whole of one’s life, and from the whole of nature. Most importantly, eroticism is not something apart from the spiritual aspects of being human. It is wholly entwined with all forms of creation, love, life, joy, humanity and the Earth herself. These things are inseparable in a young child, but vulnerable to destruction by adults and cultures that drive them into states of repression and suppression. Perhaps one of the most terrible things Western culture has done is to separate eroticism from life, emotion and spirit in our minds, and this process of estrangement begins in early childhood. I also have learned the uncomfortable lessons that some of this estrangement is unavoidable, despite our best intentions, and possibly some of it is necessary to allow a child to survive in real life. The question becomes where to locate the dividing line between allowing a child to develop naturally, and helping the child to survive. I do not claim to have the answer to this question.

The idea that eroticism and childhood are not mutually exclusive might be upsetting to some people. Thus, some definitions are in order. I do not see eroticism in adults as something that should be limited to sexual stimulation or fulfillment (although it may include these things). To me, eroticism in adults is inclusive of the full range of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual possibilities. When applied to childhood, eroticism could be defined as the wholly natural exploration of pleasure, emotions and love that is not tainted by social or religious programming. It could be further defined as the natural integration of body, mind, emotion and spirit in child development. A step further could include what might be called the divine right to pleasure, happiness and self-fulfillment in an infinite array of human contexts, which many people find to be a threatening idea because of the Judeo-Christian psychology of self-denial and self-sacrifice that permeates our culture. Pleasure, emotional connection, wholeness, acceptance, love and beauty are everyone’s birthright, and I believe that it is tragic that it has been stolen from most children and almost all adults.

In a very real sense, these poems are an attempt to reclaim our birthright of pleasure, joy, emotional closeness, spiritual wholeness, love and beauty. The poems are an attempt to portray us as we were as children and to show us what we have lost as adults, so that we might take steps to reclaim as much of our innocence as we can. Although these poems were written about a child, they were written for adults. They were written to show adults the natural beauty of eroticism that was our birthright, so that we – as adults – might connect with it again.

Over the past two years, I have watched Rhiannon develop and have learned much from her. I have learned about innocence more profoundly than I ever have before, and I have learned how innocence becomes experience in looking at Rhiannon, myself, her mother, my wife and other grown-ups I know. I have seen first-hand the beauty of innocence, and also its vulnerability – how easily it can be killed, twisted, perverted, repressed, betrayed or destroyed by adults either deliberately, or through ignorance. Like all forms of beauty, innocence is both terribly fragile, and also amazingly tough and resilient. Over the two years I have known Rhiannon, I also have become close to four adult women who were sexually abused as children, and who are in the process of healing and trying to regain the innocence they should have had as little girls. A major part of my decision to publish these poems has been the overwhelmingly positive response of these four women to them, and the fact that they have seen the poems as being important in their efforts to heal from and move beyond the sexual abuse they experienced as children.

Another very important aspect of these poems, for me, has been the affirmation of being a man that they represent. The truth is that I like being a man. That is not a putdown of women, as I see the alleged “war between the sexes” merely as a reflection of the obsession with power and control that is inherent in Western Civilization. The poems are a much-needed affirmation of man, and they honor the vital and very, very beautiful role that men play in parenting, love and life.

The seven poems that follow are part of an ongoing poetic exploration of what I have learned from Rhiannon. It is obvious that I have stolen the title to this series of poems from William Blake, a Seventeenth Century English poet. In a very real way, Blake did the same thing that I am attempting here, although within a much more generalized framework. My writing is meant to be very specific to my relationship with Rhiannon, and it is my hope that it will attain the same kind of universality that Blake found. I am indebted to William Blake in these poems, but I am much more indebted to Rhiannon.